A few days ago, Kubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail was released. I am a Kubuntu user myself, and to celebrate this new release, I wanted to share a few tips on how to set up the perfect Kubuntu environment for neuroscientists and psychologists. Of course, the ‘perfect’ environment is different everyone, but there are a few things that almost every researcher in this field will need: An office suite, a reference manager, graphics software, statistics and analysis software, and experiment building software.

What is Kubuntu?

Kubuntu is a Linux distribution. If you’re not familiar with Linux, this may not mean much to you, so let’s start with a little background.

Some relations between various flavors of Linux.

A Linux-based operating system is a layer cake. It consists of many layers of software that can be stacked and combined in an infinite number of ways. Only the bottom layer is constant: That’s the Linux kernel, which is part of all Linux-based operating systems, including Android. On top of the kernel, there can be different layers of software. Kubuntu is essentially one specific selection of software. Other Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, have slightly different selections. Some differences are clearly visible, such as different desktop environments (i.e. the software that controls the start menu, etc.). Other differences are largely under the hood, such as different system management tools.

A Linux distribution arranges the many layers of software in such a way that you, as a user, don’t have to worry about how it works.

The preference for one Linux distribution over another is entirely one of taste. I like Kubuntu because it is built on Ubuntu and Debian. These are major distributions that offer a lot of software out of the box, and you can rely on them to provide regular updates and support. The difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu is the desktop interface. Ubuntu uses Unity, which is good-looking, but highly simplified. Kubuntu uses KDE, which offers more flexibility. I particularly like Kate, the default KDE text editor, which is truly excellent for programming. The entire Ubuntu family shares the same innards, so the tips from this post apply to all of them.

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